What You Are Up Against When Devising A Treatment Plan For Syphilis

If you are a clinician and you are planning on designing a syphilis treatment plan, expect to be up against some challenges. The disease in question is caused by one well known organism: the spirochete bacterium. This would probably make you think that solving and treating this condition is very easy and straightforward. Sadly, it is quite the opposite. Treatment strategies for this condition takes a lot of work and time since it can be quite tricky. As a matter of fact, you are likely to have encountered challenges even before getting to the treatment stage - at the diagnosis stage. That is because the presentations of syphilis is quite roundabout. There is no short cuts with it. You are therefore likely to have sweated quite a bit, before arriving at the right diagnosis. It is easy to figure out these microbiological tests that are being conducted since they are simple and clear-cut. But you (as a clinician) have to first suspect the disease, in order to be in a position to order those particular microbiological tests. Suspecting syphilis is quite hard because the presentations of the disease do not directly allow one to connect the dots easily. We will now be discussing the other challenges that will be faced once the correct diagnosis has been made, and these challenges are mainly those that take place with respect to the development of the treatment plan's design.

You will be tasked to try to figure out how advanced the disease is in your patient. Now this would be quite a challenge especially if you are dealing with more than one or two patients at one time. Why is it important to figure out what the stage is? This is because you would have to use that information to plan out the appropriate treatment for the simple diseases and the more advanced diseases. Take, for example, a simple case. All you'd probably need is a single dose of penicillin via the intramuscular route to treat them. If you are dealing with patients in advanced stages; a single dose would not work. Instead, it should be administered for a period of 10 days, and it should also be administered intravenously. The challenge for the clinician is to differentiate the uncomplicated cases to be treated through a single intramuscular dose, and the complicated cases to be treated through multiple intravenous doses. Unfortunately, there is a very thin line between the simple and the complicated cases, and it's not always easy to see that line.

In most cases of syphilis, the moment it has been diagnosed, significant damage has already been done. The challenge here would be to figure out how to treat the damage. Antibiotics and other medications have been proven to be effective in stopping the disease from going further. Unfortunately, they do not treat the effects that have already taken place or fix the problems that already arose. And yet it is the desire of these patients to fix these problems too.

Clinicians are also expected to be able to somehow 'foresee' how the different treatments would affect their patients. This foresight is definitely a challenge for them. It is quite difficult to guess if patients would have allergic reactions to penicillin or other medications, once they have been administered. Even where allergies are identified, it can be hard to figure out alternative ' and equally effective -- courses of treatment. Recommended Links Cures For Syphilis